Transcript of After That, the Dark: Andrew Klavan Unpacks His New Novel

Halloween is just days away, and we are entering peak cozy mystery season. In this episode, we speak to author and Daily Wire host Andrew Claven about the latest installment in his beloved Cameron Winter mystery series. After that, The Dark, out on October 28th. I'm Georgia Howe, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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Andrew, thank you so much for coming on.

It's great to see you, Georgia.

First off, a more challenging question off the top of your head. What books are on your night stand right now?

What books are on my night stand right now? I'm reading a fairly old novel called The Wasp Factory, which I'm not enjoying at all. I'm reading a Bokoff memoir that is actually very beautiful, and I'm reading a book about the liturgy the medieval liturgy and how it affected the consciousness of people and how it basically imbued the medieval consciousness with Christianity through its rights and standards. So it's a pretty good selection.

All right. And what books are you embarrassed that you've not read yet that maybe are to be read?

Let's see, what books am I embarrassed that I haven't read yet? There's probably some classics I wish I'd read. I'd wish I'd read more French novels like Balzac and people like that. I've read some. I've read a few, but not a lot. I always think that I haven't read any science fiction, but then when I see lists of great science fiction books, I actually have read most of the big ones. But I'm a little bit bad about like that. Science fiction and the French. I just don't think should have been writing or saying, I think they should have just sat quietly in a corner and waited for European history to be over.

All right. Well, you have a new installment in the Cameron Winter mystery series. I'm actually a mystery lover, and I have not read your series yet, but it has been recommended to me, not just by people who work here, but actually by a neighbor of mine. People are talking about it, and I've heard excellent things. Before I ask about this newest book, can you just tell us about the Cameron Winter series and maybe compare it to some other books that we might recognize?

Yeah. Cameron Winter was invented for a Christmas novel that an editor, my old friend, Otto Wendell Wendell, who was the great mystery editor of his day, really the central figure in the mystery writing world. He asked me to write a Christmas novella, and I had had one in my mind for decades, and I just had I've never gotten around to figuring it out. And when I figured it out, I invented the character to go with that story. And he's a character who is a professor. He teaches English literature, but it slowly becomes clear that he has a very dark past working for the government, doing very nasty things. And he's trying to run away from that. And so I had invented a character who represented something that mattered a lot to me, which was the role of men in the world, the way that we no longer can write about male heroes, but all the really masculine guys on TV and in books are anti-heros. And they're all the Sopranos and Breaking Bad and one bad guy after another, because when you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine. So I wanted to take a guy who really was a guy who was maybe morally questionable and watch as he tried to make his way back into being a hero.

And that's what these books have turned out to be about, because after I finished the first one, I realized it was a very complex story. And so Cameron Winter is what you would call an amateur detective, and that is a very real subgenre in the genre of detectives. There are private eye stories and there are police stories, and then there are the stories of just people who know how to do this thing. And in a way, I wanted to do that because in some ways, that's the least realistic mystery of all, because most crimes are solved by police officers. But in another way, it also represents the way that ordinary people address the problem of I just have to ask, what is a Christmas novella? Well, Christmas mysteries. Christmas mysteries are the best. I mean, there are mysteries that take place during Christmas. They have to have a Christmas-y feel, at the same time, deal with a body in the library or something like that. I took a very, as you'll see, I mean, that book has been a big success, and it's still doing very well. It takes a different tack. It has a lot of Christmas feeling in it, but it also has a dark underpinning.

So it's It's different than most of them.

I love that about the mystery genre is that there are these really granular niche categories. Yes. Okay, so tell us about this most recent installment. Is this going to satisfy fans of Cameron Winter novels, or is it something new?

I think it's the best Cameron Winter novel by far. First of all, it's a love story. He falls in love. I was just paging through it because I got the hardcover only a couple of days ago. They finally sent me a copy, and I was paging through it. He's a very hard character, Cameron Winter. He's done a lot of hard things, and he's completely unsentimental, but he falls head over heels for this very convicted, evangelical Christian. She is just a real believer, and he doesn't believe in anything. He doesn't not believe, but he just doesn't address those problems. So to him, she's like the loopiest dame he's ever met. He just thinks he's crazy, but he cannot help himself. It's as if he had walked in to a love story that was already going on before he got there. And as the story starts, she tells him, just trying to entertain him on a date. She knows he solves mystery. So she tells him a true locked room mystery, which is a subgenre of the mystery story. How did a guy get killed in a room that no one was in? All the doors were locked, all the windows were closed.

How did he get killed? And he gets so fascinated by this, mostly just trying to impress her, that he finds himself carried into a very, very dark story that goes very, very deep into government and into science and into this weird company that he follows. And I think I'm really happy with it. I think it's just a really exciting story. I think that the love story is particularly charming. As I say, as I was paging through it, I thought, This is really charming. I really like this. I had forgotten that I had written it.

I was wondering if Christianity was going to make an appearance in your mystery series, and if so, how significant is that theme throughout the Cameron Winter series?

Well, it's interesting. It's interesting because I wanted him to be a non believer, but not an atheist. I mean, at this point, being an atheist is so dumb. I didn't think I could invent a smart guy to be an atheist. So I made him just a person who knows there's some mystery to life, but he doesn't believe in anything. But he's taken in. His mentor is a guy who goes by the name of the recruiter, and he's the guy who brought him into the government, turned him into an assassin. And he is just a flamingly crazed evangelical fundamentalist. But Wynter can I don't ever tell whether the guy is joking or not. The things he says are so outrageous. And so he's constantly hammering at Wynter about his unbelief and what an idiot it makes him to be an unbeliever. But at the same time, the things he says are over the top. So it's always a presence. And I always wanted it. I wanted Christianity to be a presence because I feel it's been written out of our lives. Like stories don't deal with it. People in movies don't say grace before dinner. Nobody prays on screen or anything that.

So I wanted it to be a real force, but I didn't want it to be about, you must believe in order to read these books. I just wanted it to be one of the forces in his life.

Now, you also have tried your hand at some non-fiction. I understand earlier this year, you released Kingdom of Cain. Can you tell us a little bit about that? And then I have some other questions for you that relate.

Okay. Well, Kingdom of Cain is a book about three real murders and how they kept coming up again and in movies and books and why, what it was that artists saw in these murders that connected them to the human spirit in its time. What they said about our fall from belief, what they said about our where we are as modern people. So just as an example, one of them is Ed Geen, who was a crazy man out in the Midwest who killed women and dressed in their bodies. And that, of course, inspired first the novel Psycho, which became the film Psycho, which inspired Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was also based on the Ed Geen killings. And so it was Silence of the Lambs. And the entire really slasher movie genre grows out of Ed Geen's killings. I mean, he was just this weird, obscure guy, but it became a big thing. And it addressed the questions of transgenderism, of what the female body means as we lose our faith and how people have a hard time dealing with it. And so I just took all those works of art that grow out of the Ed Geen killing and take a look at them.

And I look at them and I look at that and another murder that inspired Dostoevsky writing, Crime and Punishment. And of course, the first murder, which is Cain and Abel. I look at the way they just replay themselves throughout literature and film and art, and what that has to say about this moment of the human spirit.

I mean, that's pretty dark subject matter. A lot of times in Christian art, they don't want to look so closely at human darkness. Would you say some mystery novels will have pretty gruesome crimes? Are yours of that type or no?

I don't concentrate on the gore of the crime. I concentrate on the grief of the crime. I don't want there just to be a body, as they say, a body in the library, like an Agatha Christie, where it's just a puzzle. To me, when you kill somebody, you not only cut off a work of God's creation, you separate that work from all the people who love them. And so that's the thing I try to get at. I try to get at the tragedy of murder and why it's such a basically the basic evil act. And so I'm not a big bloodshed guy. I like action, and I like suspense, and I like fear, and all the things that go into that. But the gore is of limited interest to me. I will write it if I have to.

Now, marrying all those interests, would you ever consider doing a true crime novel, like In Cold Blood or something like that?

I would do a true crime novel like In Cold Blood, where it's actually a non-fiction novel. I would not just do the red montage that some true crime writers do, and it's really entertaining. I've read some of it, and some of it's good, but it's not my thing. I want to get at the meaning of things, and I think that fiction is actually a better way of doing that. And nobody did it better than Truman Capotian in Cold Blood and Norman Mailer in the Execution of Song. And that's the thing I have thought of from time to time.

So I was going to see what... I was interested to know if you like true crime because I love true crime, and sometimes people treat it like it's low brow.

No, it depends. Good true crime is great. I always worry when Somebody comes on and says, We found this guy was in prison and he's innocent, because it's almost like 99% sure that he's not innocent. And then I just think, Oh, now he's going to get off. But True Crime is fascinating.

Well, the greatest True Crime podcast, and I'll stand by this, is Serial Season 1. I don't know, did you listen to it? And what's funny is they did try to prove that he was innocent and did the exact opposite. All right. So before I move on from talking about your book, how did you come up with the title?

After That, the Dark, it's from a Tennison poem about his death, which was printed at the end of every collection of Tennison's poems, where he says he's sailing out the sea. And after That, the Dark, after That, the Dark, he's moving into the dark. And so it's a story about these impossible murders that take place in different parts of the country and are obviously unrelated and yet somehow have to be brought together. And so it really deals with the grief of the people involved and the fact of death and what it does, what murder does.

Just approaching Halloween, do you have any favorite scary books or even just what is your most scary book you've ever read?

Oh, my gosh. I love scary books. Although, again, I don't like gore. I don't like horror. I like ghost stories. I like that you see something out of the corner of your I. Two greatest, probably the greatest ghost story ever written is Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, which was made into a spectacular black and white film called The Innocence with Deborah Carr. It was written in part by Truman Capote. It is, to me, the gold standard of Ghost Story, but it's very, very, very subtle. And so people who are used to guys with big butcher knives jumping out at you would not be as interested in that. But I just love that Ghost Story. Another one is The Haunting, which I think was made the Same Year, another black and white film that they remade. It's based on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. And you have to not watch the remake, which is in color with Liam Neeson, but the old one is absolutely fantastic. And I love those subtle. I like subtle ghost stories.

Do you believe in ghosts?

I don't not believe in ghosts, even though Ben Shapiro makes fun of me for that. Every time I've got more than 10 people in a room at a dinner party of mine, I will ask them, has anyone ever seen a ghost? I have never gotten 10 people to say no. There's always someone who's seeing them, same people with very convincing stories. I'm such a skeptic that I would have to see a transparent guy in chains saying, repent before I would actually believe. But I can't stop feeling like just so many people have seen them, there must be something to it.

That's been my experience as well. If you were having a dinner party and you were going to invite three writers from time past or time present, who would they Well, first of all, Shakespeare, because I do not understand how a human being could have done what he did.

I mean, there is no body of work that contains so much of the human spirit as William Shakespeare. So I might just invite Shakespeare, and then I'm not sure I would want to invite anyone else to interrupt him. But if I were, I would love to meet John Keats. He has been like my companion through life, one of the greatest poets who ever lived. And maybe there's nothing like Charles Dickens. The guy was just... Every time I want to dismiss him as being sentimental or liberal or anything like that, I go back and read him again. What a writer. What a great storyteller. Great writer. So I'd love to have those three guys in a room and then just sit back and drink quietly while they talk to each other.

Well, and this somewhat relates because you could, I suppose, ask them for some advice, but what's the best writing advice that you've ever gotten?

The best writing advice, I think, is Elmore Leonard. He didn't say this to me, but he used to say this to inspiring writers who He would say, I don't have time to write. He would say, Wake up an hour earlier. And I guess the best advice I ever got was from Raymond Chandler, a letter that he wrote saying, I always spend four hours a day doing nothing but writing. I don't have to write, but I can't do anything else. And that was how I built my discipline as a boy. When I was 14, I just started spending four hours a day just sitting in front of what was then a typewriter and just not doing anything but writing. And that has been the best thing in the world for me. The other thing I have to say to young writers, learn grammar. Get a book, a workbook, go through it, learn how to use an English sentence.

All right. Last question. If you could require the President to read one book, what would it be?

One book of mine or any book?

Well, I mean, you could make a business decision there, but one book you can choose, however.

I can choose any book I want. What's the book I would have him read? Gee, that's such an interesting story. I wouldn't touch our I think he's doing such a great job that I would be afraid of putting any idea in his mind that would change whatever he's doing because he seems to do it instinctively. But I think that if I had to recommend one book to him, it would probably be Christmas Carol, because Christmas Carol is, somebody once called it the Fifth Gospel, and it is the gospel distilled into a story. And I don't think that Trump, I think, has moved toward faith, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But I think it is the simplest way to explain the Christian faith to anybody is to read a Christmas Carol. It's a story about how the past, the present, and the future all come together, and we're all responsible to each of them. It begins when the ghost of Jacob Marley shows up, and He starts questioning Ebenezer Scrooge, asking him, do you believe in me or not? Do you believe in the spirit or not? Because everything else grows out of that.

Everything else grows out of that question. Do you really believe that there is such a thing as a human spirit? And it just It takes you through a man's life who has slowly given in to complete materialism. He starts out as a young man with some idealism, and it slowly shrivels up in the presence of money and the presence of ambition and all of the things that drive us. And I think that what's wonderful about it is that Dickens gives Scrooge really good arguments for being who he is. And I think that when you talk to materialists, they do have good arguments for being what they are. And it's only a realization that there is a soul and that that soul is eternal and that the things that you do affect its passage into eternity that change the way we look at material things. That's a brilliant, brilliant way of explaining the gospel without explaining it.

I love that interpretation, and I'm going to carry it with me next time I watch that. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on.

It's great to see you. You guys do a great job.

That was Andrew Claven, and his new book, After That, The Dark, releases Tuesday, October 28. Thanks for listening, and this has been a weekend edition of MorningWire.